Putnam, F. W. (Frederic Ward), 1839-1915

Frederic Ward Putnam (1839-1915) was one of the earliest anthropologists in the United States. He founded institutions for anthropological research at Harvard University and at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked to establish museum collections in anthropology. Putnam taught anthropology, archaeology and ethnology at Harvard University. He directed some of the first field expeditions in the Americas, including sites in Maine, Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin, Kentucky, New Jersey, and California.

Putnam was born April 16, 1839 in Salem, Massachusetts to Mr. and Mrs. Ebenezer Putnam III. In 1864, Putnam married Adelaide Martha Edmands; they had three children: Eben Putnam, Alice Edmands Putnam, and Ethel Appleton Fiske Lewis. On March 10, 1879, Mrs. Adelaide Putnam passed away; in 1882, Putnam remarried Esther Orne Clark. Putnam's early education consisted of home and private schooling, and it was at this time that he expressed an interest in studying nature. Putnam, along with his father, cultivated plants and later began observing the birds in the area. Later, he trained under Henry Wheatland as an intern at the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1856, at the age of sixteen, he successfully published List of the Birds of Essex County. In that same year, he entered Harvard College where he studied under the tutelage of Professor Louis Agassiz at the Lawrence Scientific School, serving as his assistant from 1857-1864.

In 1875, Putnam was appointed Curator of Harvard's Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology. With Putnam at the helm, the focus of the Peabody Museum shifted from archaeology to physical anthropology and ethnology. He was responsible for a variety of museum functions which included not only administrative duties but field collecting, curation of collections, fund raising, and teaching in the Harvard College Department of Anthropology. In 1876, Putnam directed the first major construction of the Peabody Museum building that currently sits on Divinity Avenue in Cambridge. Putnam was appointed professor of anthropology in 1885 (the position was authorized in 1887). He retained that post until 1909 and was then Professor Emeritus and Honorary Director.

He also co-founded the anthropology programs at the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley. At the age of sixty-four, he became the University of California's first Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Anthropological Museum. In 1909, Putnam retired from the University of California and was later appointed Professor Emeritus there. In 1894 he began devoting half his time to the curatorship in anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, and was influential in dispatching the productive Jesup North Pacific Expedition to northeastern Asia and northwestern North America.

Putnam was active in professional associations. In 1873, Putnam was elected to the post of permanent secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a position he held until 1898, at which time he was bestowed with the presidency of the Association. He helped establish the journals American Naturalist, Science, American Anthropologist, and founded organizations, such as Anthropology of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the Archaeological Institute of America, and the American Anthropological Association.

Putnam was appointed the lead curator and head of the anthropology department in 1891 for the World's Columbian Exposition, to be held in Chicago in 1893.

Putnam's publications number more than 400, and cover the subjects of natural history, archaeology, anthropology, and scientific administration.